Serato Video seems poised to be a leader in introducing visuals to the DJ world. It’s maturing fast, and while there are a lot of options for these kind of visuals, few could boast this sort of friendly, minimal, familiar Serato-style interface. It’s also eminently controllable for turntablists and controllerists – at least if they’re in the Serato ecosystem – with support for Serato Control Vinyl, Control CDs, and the ITCH Controller. And that’s all you need – while it’d be nice to see some non-ITCH hardware support (uh, please), you don’t need special Rane mixers for this rig as you did with early VIDEO-SL versions.

(For some healthy competition, see MixEmergency, though interestingly, that, too, is for Serato users.)

The former VIDEO-SL plug-in had seen some updates, but this is the first time the new, standalone Serato Video product gets an update. And there are some significant new features:

Delay compensation, keeping video and sound in sync in the house – essential for audiovisualists (and something I’d like to see standard on video software, as it typically is for audio)

Serato is finally working at getting updates out and communicating with their users after taking a break that lasted a couple years on the video side. These are all catch-up features Mix Emergency has had for some time and that were requested for years.

M.E. is definitely the smarter, better-looking, more-VJ-friendly of the two. Unless you want to use Itch hardware like the VCI-380, it’s still the best choice.